We were amongst the unhappy cruisers waiting desperately to get on board 1/14/10. We were forewarned by the cruise line and the situation was still handled very poorly but once the ordeal was behind us we had a wonderful trip. We boarded at about six and sailed at 9:15pm.
The ship was in pretty good shape, she is ten years old, you could see some of the work that had been done in dry dock but we still had an old TV, not that it mattered because the tv choices on board are awful, and run in a loop. That got very old on a ten night voyage. One problem we had throughout the voyage was the vacuum system that runs the toilets went down several times, often the whole floor would be out, sometimes individual cabins and very often public rest rooms were closed. That was extremely annoying! Otherwise the cabin was very nice and our room steward did a good job of keeping things clean, although she did have some difficulty figuring our schedule out, we would return from dinner and she still had not been in, we had early seating. The bed was comfortable, storage was adequate for two people, we over packed, and I bought too much for warm weather and not enough for cool weather.
There were activities planned but not a lot, the general tone of the cruise was pretty calm. There were many senior citizens on board, I had heard that was the case on longer voyages. We are 47 and 50 years old, there were plenty of others in our age group and some families, not many young people, this is not a party cruise. We enjoy quiet spaces for reading and relaxing and we had no problem finding that. We rarely participate in planned activities but do enjoy watching them, very hard to find, I think it's difficult with the combo of cold days so the pool deck is not the main focus area and the Promenade is just too small to accommodate that many passengers.